Narcissus

Narcissus is a JavaScript interpreter written in pure JavaScript, using the SpiderMonkey engine.

Originally a proof-of-concept by Brendan Eich, Narcissus is being revived as a test-bed for rapidly prototyping new language features for the JavaScript language (and ECMAScript standard).

Downloading

Narcissus is included in the main SpiderMonkey source code tree. To download it, follow the instructions for downloading and building the SpiderMonkey source, and run the "njs" script from the build directory.

Terminology

Since JavaScript is both the language of the implementation and the language being implemented, it's helpful to distinguish the two levels conceptually. We use the term host ("host code," "host JavaScript," etc) to describe the JavaScript code of the implementation and user ("user code," "user JavaScript," etc) to describe the JavaScript code being interpreted.

Contributors

• Tom Austin
• Brendan Eich
• Andreas Gal
• Shu-yu Guo
• Dave Herman
• Dimitris Vardoulakis
• Patrick Walton